Sitemeter

Amazon

January 31, 2010

The prolific novelist Anne Manning (1807-79), best known for the diary novel The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell, Afterwards Mistress Milton (1849), produced a number of gently controversial novels over the course of her career, of which The Duchess of Trajetto (1863) is one. The Duchess was one of the small cluster of historical novels, beginning with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento and George Eliot's Romola, inspired by the Italian Risorgimento. A number of Anglo-American Protestants believed--understandably, but, as it happened, incorrectly--that the Risorgimento heralded a revival of the Reformation within Italy, and their novels turned to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to reinvestigate the Italian Reformation's initial failure.

The heroine of The Duchess is Giulia Gonzaga, with special guest appearances by Cardinal Ippolito de Medici, Sebastiano del Piombo, Vittoria Colonna, Bernardino Ochino, and Juan de Valdes. Although the opening, which dumps the reader directly into Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha's attempt to kidnap Giulia, seems to set up an adventure tale, the plot rapidly tails off into a straightforward conversion narrative. Giulia "had not the faith which saves" (222), the narrator tells us, and the narrative dwells on Giulia's own laughable attempts to convert her Muslim servant to Christianity; similarly, her would-be lover Ippolito de Medici, who "believed in nothing" (175), gets nowhere with a Jewish physician, Bar Hhasdai. In fact, the novel winds up having harsh, or at least cool, words for most of its attempted Reformers. Vittoria Colonna is a pure, devout woman, but rejects Reforming opinions in the end (263), while the novel's historical appendix denounces both Ochino and Peter Martyr for having "left the sheep, and fled" (277). By contrast, the rather flibbertygibbety Giulia undergoes an authentic conversion experience at the hands of Juan de Valdes--skipping the bit about how Giulia spent the last three decades of her life in a convent--and winds up a thorough-going Protestant. Her conversion derives from de Valdes' insistence on loving all things "for the sake of God" (254), "love" being the key to Giulia's earlier lack of saving faith; the true sign of her conversion comes at the end of the novel, when Giulia's will orders her heir to free her Moorish slave, Cynthia, without looking into the possibility that she might have been in league with Barbarossa (271). This decision enables Cynthia to reconcile herself to Giulia's memory on the grounds of their mutual "love" (273), and the reader is probably intended to see Cynthia's breakdown as proof of her impending conversion.

Although The Duchess of Trajetto spends little time on theological disquisition, it does insist that early modern Catholicism was not only an entirely degenerate affair, but also that it shared in the brutal violence of its opponents. Thus, while the opening invasion appears to cast the Ottoman Empire as the dreaded heathen Other, Cynthia's and Bar Hhasdai's personal narratives promptly undercut this account: both Cynthia and Bar Hhasdai come from families that were forcibly and horrifically ejected from their homes as a result of the Reconquista. Understandably, neither one feels much in the way of affection for Christianity. Manning uses Bar Hhasdai's story to attack a number of anti-Semitic beliefs currently in circulation, including the recently-revived interest in the blood libel (76). Similarly, Cynthia becomes a vehicle for denouncing superficial attempts to interpret disasters in providential terms: when Giulia suggests that Cynthia's translation from a Muslim to a Christian household must, after all, be a "great mercy" (11), Cynthia firmly replies, "'No, [...] I do not feel grateful that I was torn from my home and country, and
that my father was cut down on his own doorstep, and my mother dragged
along the ground by the hair of her head" (12). (Giulia, not getting the point, insists that perhaps this might be a case of a "blessing in disguise" [12], and is then reminded that Giulia herself does not seem to interpret the current invasion that way.) These attacks on Christian anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic acts are not intended to make the reader believe that remaining Jewish or Muslim is a viable position; rather, they are part and parcel of the novel's conversionist project, intended to make the reader understand that, again, "love" is the cornerstone of evangelization, not horrific persecution. For example, when Bar Hhasdai offers up a parable to explain why Jews do not convert to Christianity, the Cardinal accepts his reasoning, but the narrator coolly observes that "in fact, it was very superficial" (71); moreover, a footnote dismisses the Mishna as a "bold imposture" (118).

The narrator's interjection highlights one of the more striking things about the novel's practice: its refusal to let the reader be fully engaged in the story as such. Manning involves a number of distancing strategies to remind the reader that the story is being told in the present, and that the narrative is derived from texts and objects accessible elsewhere. To begin with, the narrator goes beyond the usual moralizing to be downright condescending, especially about the decidedly flighty Giulia--who cannot help complaining that Cynthia has provided "only slippers" (11) for their escape from Barbarossa. As a result, Giulia's final flowering into exemplary status feels like an afterthought, especially because the novel usually asks us to recognize ourselves in the characters only as a dissuasive move (don't do that). In addition, the narrator frequently yanks us back to "now": she jokes about Elizabeth Barrett Browning (120) and the Pre-Raphaelites (105), criticizes (the unnamed) biographer William Roscoe's attitude to the Medicis (63), and twice sends the reader off to the National Gallery to see paintings of Giulia and the Cardinal (45, 106). Occasionally, the narrator quotes directly from the sources, whether sixteenth-century or Victorian. Moreover, the narrative actually climaxes in the production of a text that had been translated into English for the first time in 1861, Juan de Valdes' Alfabeto Christiano. In effect, the novel makes no attempt to hide its Victorian bookishness.

January 27, 2010

Henry Adams' most recent foray into the foibles of his professors included, among other things, a classic example of the "shame the authority" trope. (Incidentally, there has to be an actual name for this, since I see it so often in controversial literature: the student/child/whatever asks an "innocent" question of the professor/priest/whatever, only to leave the authority figure completely flummoxed. Student/child/whatever triumphs; bonus points if the two are on different political, religious, or cultural sides.) "Dr. Ethos" recommends spending no more than "10 minutes" grading each comp paper. Cue Henry Adams, giving in to "the imp of the perverse": "'I raised my hand and said politely, "It's good to know that I need to
grade six papers per hour, but right now I can handle only four. Could
you and the other professors give us tips on how you reach the
six-per-hour rate?'" Needless to say, Dr. Ethos retreats: "'Dr. Ethos looked down at her paper. "You just have to learn to pace yourself," she said. "Let's move on.'"

Impishness aside, Adams doesn't really address the question of how much commentary really assists the students--and to what extent "commenting" becomes its own performance. As some of the commenters point out, spending an hour per paper doesn't necessarily help anyone, even if it makes the instructor feel like a Virtuous Soul. On the one hand, I've heard students complain that they get papers back with no comments on them at all; on the other hand, like every other professor on the continent, the planet, and quite possibly the known universe, I've frequently found that the students don't necessarily read comments once they get them. (Student hands in draft; instructor makes various and sundry corrections on the draft; student hands in revision; instructor can't help noticing that the errors are still there.) When you're faced with a particularly hapless paper, it's difficult to know what to do. Mark every error? (I've done that, leaving the student with more comments than paper.) Say "I stopped commenting here"? (I've also done that, but it feels cruel.) Stop commenting without calling attention to the fact? (Then the student wonders if you also stopped reading.) Trot out "See me immediately"? (This generally gets us somewhere, although I often have to hold back the grade until the student shows up.)

I long ago gave up the stopwatch approach. Instead, my practice is as follows:

1) No more than seven papers at a time.

2) More and more, I find myself marking basic errors once, then telling the student that it's his or her responsibility to find the rest.

3) I summarize the overall gist of my comments at the end of the paper, right before I give the student a grade. (I usually try to start off the summary by saying something positive about the argumentation.)

4) After every batch of papers, I compile examples of the most frequent errors, append a cutesy title ("Law and Order: Grammatical Intent"), and discuss them with the class. At the very least, even if the students fail to read the comments, they'll still hear me talking about misplaced modifiers and the like.

January 25, 2010

For anyone who studies historical fiction, Richard Maxwell's The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650-1950 already announces its revisionist agenda in the title: instead of pinpointing Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels as the "beginning" of the historical novel, Maxwell turns Scott's oeuvre into a kind of transformative funnel. As Scott transforms the French historical romance, most famously practiced by Madeleine de Scudery, so Hugo and Flaubert transform Scott. But Maxwell goes further. He argues that this transit between Scotland and France, which he dubs the "Franco-Scottish model for historical fiction," in fact defined the genre for its nineteenth-century readers and practitioners (5); the explicitly English historical novel, by contrast, fails to move in quite the same way, suffering from a lack of "cultural mobility" because it "makes little or no sense off home ground" (234). (One is reminded of David Masson's influential work of novel criticism, British Novelists and Their Styles [1859], which concluded that Scott "has Scotticised European literature.") As Maxwell's footnotes make clear, this pointedly Scottish reading of the genre after Scott owes much to James K. Chandler's England in 1819 and Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism--and, although it goes unmentioned, perhaps something to the work of Robert Crawford as well. By hiving the "English" historical novel off into its own little space, headlined as "alternative," Maxwell sharply undercuts the practice of referring to a generic "English historical novel" that encompasses Scott, or even a "British historical novel."

The book is difficult to summarize adequately, for although the title promises a linear tour through three hundred years' worth of historical fiction, the chapters actually proceed in snapshot fashion. Perhaps intentionally, the reader is left wondering about that "the" in The Historical Novel...; Maxwell is not interested in narrowing down the genre's capaciousness. As a genre, he comments, it is "hard to isolate or get into focus" (8), and the study itself feels strangely elusive at times. However, at least two themes recur with some regularity. First, Maxwell finds that both the French historical romances and the Waverley Novels preoccupy themselves with ringing changes on the interrelations of "particular history" ("the life of a town, a country, or especially a renowned figure" [13-14]) and the "secret history" (which "uses hidden personal motives or characteristics to clarify the meaning of conspiracies or other struggles for political and military power" [14]). In Scott, this tension plays itself out through the apparently contradictory styles of world-historical narrative and the "seemingly improbable portal of antiquarianism" (59). Rather like Wordsworthian spots of time, Scott's narratives "offer glimpses of history" (93), which turn "history" into something escapable--yet they also represent historical existence as "immersion" (98), from which neither character nor reader can necessarily escape at all. Second, Maxwell dwells on the significance of violence, which manifests itself in two popular plotlines: tales about royal pretenders (Perkin Warbeck and company) and warfare, especially "siegecraft." Such stories enable novelists to imagine and critique a particular type of hero, whether the "world-historical individual" (170) who vanishes into the imagination or the "collective protagonist" (172) who defends and batters down the walls. The specifically English historical novel, Maxwell argues, turns out to be the province of childhood, both in the form of the children's historical novel and in historical novels featuring children. Maxwell's exemplary "English" novelists in this respect are G. A. Henty and Charlotte Yonge, whose works, he argues, "highlight the steep learning curve of the young person pushed into a historical crisis" (252).

In dating the historical novel back to 1650, Maxwell punches a hole in the genre's usual chronology, but he also takes aim at its most prominent theorist, Georg Lukacs--as the study announces on its very first page. But the study engages with Lukacs only by appearing not to engage with Lukacs; after Lukacs' rather non-triumphant entry in the introduction, The Historical Novel's theoretical limitations generally appear only in asides, as when Maxwell notes that Lukacs "avoided Dumas" because "the attempt to apply the Waverley formula of the 'classical historical novel' to Bragelonne would make a hash of the formla and the book" (149). Noting, correctly, that few scholars actually finish The Historical Novel, Maxwell points out that it "fixate[s]" (66) on the historical novel as modeled by Scott, and treats all later attempts at the form as sad deviants from the original; when Lukacs shifts his attention from Scott to Balzac, the historical novel qua form simply vanishes into contemporary realism. Maxwell, however, rejects Lukacs' glum sense that the historical novel simply declines and falls. Rather, there are historical novels, and the form continually regenerates itself in new shapes as the centuries wear on. (Indeed, Maxwell could have followed Tomas Hägg by dating the historical novel back to antiquity!)

Despite its title, then, this study does not define a genre so much as demonstrate how porous its boundaries are, and many of its larger implications remain unstated. What does it mean to transform the "English" historical novel into a quintessentially regional genre? (And is the "English" historical novel really as localized as Maxwell argues?) Where does Irish historical fiction--treated by critics from James Cahalan on as a deeply troubled genre--fit into the Franco-Scottish paradigm? Is it significant that women historical novelists seem to drop out of the middle of Maxwell's argument? One wonders, too, where modernist reworkings of the historical novel--e.g., Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen, or Virginia Woolf's Orlando--fit in this scheme. Nevertheless, readers already well-versed in the theory of historical fiction should find this a stimulating read.

January 24, 2010

Between revising Book Two and revising my syllabi, I've found myself saying, "Blog? What blog?!" However, I can promise a post on Richard Maxwell's new book on the historical novel, hopefully by tomorrow night.

Meanwhile, I've been pondering my unwillingness to delete books from Book Two, even though it is often the case that no-one but myself has read said books in the past century or so...which makes it highly unlikely that any possible readers will feel like they've suffered from the omission. (All those who have read Alfred Butler's Midsummer Eve, raise your hand.)

January 21, 2010

1. I rotated Bleak House--a.k.a. the greatest British novel of the nineteenth century--back into the Victorian seminar. We shall see what happens. (Actually, despite stereotypes about kids these days who refuse to read, my students usually like Bleak House. Well, except for the one who claimed that she was permanently traumatized by it. But that's unusual, you understand.)

2. Of the other two courses, Intro to Lit Analysis is the most changed: the second half of the course consists of works I've never taught before, and I've changed a number of poems in the first half. British Literature II does not lend itself to such radical revision, because it's the "let me introduce you to the canon" class; the changes this time around were mostly prompted by using the Longman anthology instead of the Norton.

3. One of the reasons for reworking syllabi, of course, is that it forces you off auto-pilot. There are only so many times you can teach Jane Eyre before intense hostility sets in--four times in a single year, for example. (Yes, I did that. Once.) Introducing new works highlights entirely new literary connections and echoes; for example, we'll be talking about the relationship between D. G. Rossetti's "The Woodspurge" and William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud," which raises its own questions about tradition and revision. Such turns of the kaleidoscope, as it were, revitalize a course that you may have taught two, three, or ten times before. At a certain point, however, you have to accept that you've figured out how best to teach a particular text to your audience, without necessarily burning the midnight oil. Sometimes, intellectual labor can be blossoming and dancing...

4. Ironically, I find it easier to write during the school year then not, which will no doubt be good for Book Two--which, as it turns out, apparently needs one more chapter on an author whom somebody, anybody, can recognize. Ergo, George Eliot's Romola. That chapter has already got itself going nicely, so, with any luck, I can settle down to think about where the book will voyage next.

January 19, 2010

In Joyce Carol Oates' novels, middle-class, WASPish American families regularly turn out to be dens of sexual repression (or excess), warped emotion, female self-loathing, violent masculinity, and general oddity. Critics often point to Oates' affinities for the Gothic and the grotesque, and certainly her novels tend to locate the dark side of American culture in the landscape of "normal" domestic life. The Falls, which unfolds over a period of nearly thirty years, does tread some familiar territory in its representation of life around the Niagara Falls. But it also deviates from Oates' frequently glum take on both romance and the family by being ever-so-slightly optimistic--about love, about redemption, and, perhaps, about the country itself.

If we look at the novel's parts--"Honeymoon," "Marriage," "Family," "Epilogue"--the narrative appears to travel a well-worn romantic path. In fact, however, it opens with a failure, told from three points of view: the suicide at Niagara Falls of the Rev. Gilbert Erskine, overcome with sexual revulsion after his grotesque wedding night. A gay man without knowing it (he is in love with a friend from the seminary), Erskine has married because, in terms of a "normal" life narrative, marriage is what you do. Already anxious about evolution, with its threat of "[b]lindness, accident" (30), the nevertheless scientifically-inclined Gil simultaneously yearns for and recoils from certainty. Ariah Littrell, a few years Gil's senior, had appeared to be the solution to Gil's impending identity crisis, but his world explodes when the "[c]haste and virginal and cool to the touch as an icicle" woman of their courtship morphs into a "smeared greedy face" (33) during their desperate (on her part, in any rate) attempt at mating. The awkward, eventually violent nature of their unerotic grappling turns sexuality into a chaotic abyss--the realm of "accident" from which Gil already cringes. Seeking sexlessness, the misogynistic Gil instead finds a stereotypically monstrous female body. Although he attempts to dress it up as a "crucifixion" (37), Gil kills himself in order to make his beloved Douglas "see" and suffer, along with the rest of the world (37). In effect, Gil dies from the clash between his unspoken (and, in this framework, unspeakable) desires and the life to which society demands he aspire.

Gil's suicide turns out to be the novel's most repressed non-secret. It is never clear who fathers Chandler, Ariah's eldest son--Gil or Dirk Burnaby, Ariah's second husband? (Although Gil and Ariah technically fail to consummate the marriage, what the novel describes still allows for a potential pregnancy.) More to the point, Gil's sudden death structures the rest of Ariah's life, especially her terror of abandonment and her attempts to control her children. In addition, the manner of Gil's death continually repeats itself in distorted form: Dirk's "suicide" (actually a political assassination), Chandler's work with the Samaritans, and Dirk's daughter Juliet's suicidal impulses. Even though he disappears in the novel's opening chapters, then, Gil continually resurfaces, like his battered corpse, in unrecognizable shapes.

The Falls themselves, we are told at the beginning, allure suicides because they promise the total erasure of self, "[e]very shadow and echo of every memory erased" (5). This spectacle of nature at its most brutal and beautiful finds its purely human counterpoint in Love Canal, which destroys Ariah's second husband as the Falls did the first. But while Gil seeks to obliterate himself because he can neither live with nor without his "normal" marriage, Dirk finds a different form of self-obliteration: he must abandon his class privileges in order to help the so-called "Woman in Black," Nina Olshaker, who has already lost one child to the contamination. Initially, Dirk imagines the crusade as a "new game," something to "master" (205); it is just one more extension of his upper-class masculine existence. But soon, Dirk discovers that helping those in need earns him only the hatred of Niagara Falls' social elites, who see him as a threat to their cushy lifestyles. (As we discover by the end of the novel, the man who orders the hit is one of Dirk's old drinking buddies.) To make matters worse, he discovers that his own family has been involved in the pollution, making him "involved in this, too" (223). Like Gil, Dirk dies because he cannot uphold the status quo; unlike Gil, Dirk manages to identify where the rot lies.

Despite Dirk's obsession with Love Canal, the novel almost completely erases mid-century American politics; we hear next to nothing of Vietnam (beyond Chandler's opposition), the Civil Rights movement, and the like. This restricted vision echoes Ariah's own refusal to pay attention to current events--in fact, Ariah doesn't even know that Dirk is involved in the Love Canal suit until her sister-in-law claims that he is having an affair with Nina. Ariah "never watched TV news or read the front pages of newspapers where 'disturbing' news might be printed. Quickly she turned to features, to women's pages, entertainment, comics" (227). Like Gil, in a way, Ariah fears anything that might disturb her eternally fragile equanimity; current events always make her "alarmed, agitated" (192). Too, the only way she can maintain her own "normal" marriage, in which "[s]he was wife who stayed home while husband drove each weekday morning into the city to his law office" (127), is to radically segregate herself from the evils of the outside world; even when she returns to work as a music teacher, the work comes home to her. Every political crisis or natural disaster brings with it the possibility of Dirk's sudden death or disappearance, which she simultaneously fears and expects (164).

As a result, this is a historical novel featuring a character who evades history whenever possible--an evasion further manifesting itself in Ariah's figuratively undead status as a "ghost." As the "Widow-Bride of the Falls," Ariah passes into anonymous local legend, an undatable and supernatural phenomenon instead of an "event." One young woman explains to her that the "ghost of the Widow-Bride still kept her vigil" at the Falls (175). Given that Ariah is, in fact, effectively trapped in the past, forever fearing that her first husband's disappearance will be repeated, the legend holds more than a kernel of accidental truth. It is also in keeping with Ariah's own belief that she is "damned," a judgment she frequently repeats. Ariah refuses to believe Dirk's account of his relationship with Nina because, of course, she has always been sure that he would abandon her; however, this self-destructive assurance also follows from her belief that she has already been subjected to a final judgment. Thus, where Gil and Dirk are both killed, more or less, by their refusal to go along with a socially acceptable "story," Ariah assumes that the end of her own story is a foregone conclusion.

The final chapters, however, suggest that there might be a way out of this impasse (although the final ambiguity about second son Royall leaves even this open to question). Chandler, compelled to face death over and over again in his work with the Samaritans, nevertheless manages to find love. Juliet, who attempts suicide, is rescued by--and herself rescues--the son of a man involved in her own father's fate. Royall frees himself from his mother and, despite his earlier failures at school, reinvents himself as a serious college student. Even Ariah seems to find something that might be love with a Holocaust survivor, whose relationship to his own past--"He was in Birkenau. He will never not be 'in Birkenau''" (399)--has some commonalities with Ariah's. And Dirk Burnaby is ultimately celebrated as the man who put the Love Canal crusade into motion, even though, as his children admit to themselves, "You do have to laugh. Vindication, validation, redemption, and so forth. Sixteen years too late" (480). The possibility of a better future rests, somehow, on the belief that there is a future, that the story doesn't have a predetermined end. And yet, we are still left with the sense that this belief, too, can be easily crushed by history's mill.

January 17, 2010

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (Knopf, 2007). In Nazi-era Germany, a young girl steals books. With a special appearance by the man with the scythe. (Gift)

Joyce Carol Oates, The Falls: A Novel (Harper Perennial, 2008). In 1950, a man just married commits suicide by jumping into the Niagara Falls; the novel traces the next thirty years of his wife's emotional fallout and its effects on her second husband, their children, and their families. (Borders)

Paul West, A Fifth of November (New Directions, 2004). Historical novel set during the Gunpowder Plot. (eBay)

Leopold von Ranke, The History of the Popes, of Their Church and State, and Especially of Their Conflicts with Protestantism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. E. Foster, 3 vols. (George Bell, 1876). Famed historical study. There are notes on Ranke and some useful links here. (eBay)

The Papacy of Modern Times: Report of the National Convention of Protestants Held in Glasgow, December 1886 (Scottish Protestant Alliance, [1887]). Collection of anti-Catholic essays, lectures, addresses, etc. (eBay)

The Gospel Messenger II (1854). Church of Scotland magazine; incomplete volume with what appears to be the wrong title page. (eBay)

The Church Monitor, A Magazine Advocating Catholic Doctrine and Practice I (1866). Anglo-Catholic magazine. (eBay)

Donal A. Kerr, Peel, Priests, and Politics: Sir Robert Peel's Administration and the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1841-1846 (Oxford, 1984). Relations between the RCC and the British government up to the Famine. (Amazon [secondhand])